In .NET 1.x filling a DataSet or a DataTable meant quite some work. You needed to create a Connection object, a DataAdapter and optionally a Command object. Then you had to call the Fill method on the DataAdapter and pass it a newly created DataSet or DataTable.

In .NET 2.0, this code model has been simplified, thanks to the Load method on the DataTable and DataSet classes that takes an IDataReader as a parameter.

When you need to insert a null value into a column in an Access database, you could use "" to indicate a zero-length string. However, a zero-length string is not the same as Null. To insert a Null value, simple pass the keyword Null for the column, as shown in the code example.